This post is 34 years too late. (Reply)

I should've written it before I was born, but I just - omg, I can't believe I just watched that.

So someone linked to this show that I'd seen in reruns and had really liked when I was ten - The Fantastic Journey. Basically it is an extremely low-budget 1977 scifi tv show in which the Bermuda triangle is a collapsed space-time-whatever with lots of bands of different times. Our heroes are trying to get back to their own times and out of said Bermuda Triangle without being killed by random sixteenth century English naval dudes or twenty-second century androids. As a consequence, there is hilarious fighting, and hilarious pseudo-time-travel, and hilarious future-dudes (Varian, who travels with them, is from the future, when there are no nations and everyone is a pacifist and doctors use music to heal people) and hilarious low-budget psychic ladies (Liana, who is an alien AND from the future, has a psychic relationship with her cat which mostly involves picking it up and staring intently into its face and cuts to close-up cat face in which the cat is blinking).

Anyway! I thought I'd snag some of it and watch it nostalgically and facepalm at my younger self, who totally had a crush on Varian and his deep v-neck shirts. The copies that I have are off of VHS from the circa-1992 scifi channel, without the commercials edited out, so it's basically 100% my childhood experience of watching the show. (Omni and Psychic Hotline commercials! Yeesh.)

Except I started with the pilot and the first couple of episodes, which I'd missed when I was a kid. And, omg, Varian is captured and whipped by the sixteenth century English navy (offscreen, probably for budget reasons) and in order to hide from them he dresses up as an Indian and wears a long dark black wig and spray-tans himself and puts on a fake amulet and then pretends not to speak English and meanwhile I'm going WHAT? WHAT? WHEN WE FIRST MEET THIS GUY HE'S DOING WHAT? And everyone on the show is like, hey, that makes sense! Don't ... run through to the next time zone, or hide out in your future crashed ship. No! Dress up as Indian so that when the people from our time meet you they can be all "wow, that Indian is totes competent! and not trying to hurt us! it's a shocking reveal! oh wait he's a white dude from the future where there's no racism, our mistake."

So that was ... pretty bad. AND THEN I had also missed the part of the story where Willoway joined the team, so I just had this vague impression that he used to live on a villa with a bunch of androids and then he decided to try to find a way home instead.

Which was SORT OF true, but missed the important part of the story where he found Liana unconscious and was all "hurrah, a real woman! I'll marry her!" and then when she said "um, you're creeping me out," he said "oh, my mistake, feel free to leave whenever you want, how about one last drink for the road," and then he drugged her. And, okay, this by itself would not be all that bad, really, because it's supposed to be creepy. Except that, you know, he ends up joining the team. "Hey no big about that whole rape - oh, sorry, I mean 'forced marriage' - thing, buddy, you're played by Roddy McDowall and are the only moderately famous guy on the show, so why not come along with us!" WHAT.

Oh wait that wasn't the worst WHAT, the worst WHAT was when the future dude was like "they credit you with coming up with the scientific ethics that led to my [perfect future] world!" Seriously. That dude's ethics will lead to a perfect world.

OR maybe the worst WHAT was when he was all "oh, Liana, I hope you can forgive me, I only wanted some human company," and she giggles and says "oh, we can give you that."

ANYWAY that is a show I just watched. So now instead of feeling nostalgic, I am feeling cranky.